Bundy Ranch Prosecutors Appeal For Retrial After They Violated Federal Law

Yep, Brady violator and US Attorney Steven Myhre, who has prosecuted several Bundy trials and retrials yielding virtually nothing, has decided to appeal to Judge Gloria Navarro for retrial of the defendants even though he violated their constitutional rights by not disclosing exculpatory evidence in the trial.

Myhre appealed to Navarro in a 55-page legal brief to retry Cliven, Ryan and Ammon Bundy and Ryan Payne and said that his failure to provide evidence to the defense in the previous trial was simply “inadvertent” or because they reasonably believed the law didn’t require them to share the material.

“The Brady violations found by the court are regrettable and benefit no one,” Myhre wrote in his brief. “But because the government neither flagrantly violated nor recklessly disregarded its obligations, the appropriate remedy for such violations is a new trial.”

Furthermore, by writing the way he did, Myhre is not denying that he violated the law, he’s just using the Hillary Clinton argument that he didn’t mean to violate the law. That’s clearly debatable, but the fact is that he and his team did violate the law on several occasions.

Also, those violations withheld hard evidence of the defense’s claim regarding the tyranny the Bundys were subjected to, so his argument that the evidence “benefits no one” is absurd.

According to Judge Navarro, the exculpatory evidence that was not turned over to defense teams were favorable to them and was “willful.”

The prosecutors claim they couldn’t simply turn over all the material, citing “harassment and threats” made to witnesses, victims and officers in the case who would be in jeopardy if personal information got out, especially on social media.

They also cited the massive volume of documents, videos and emails from two federal agencies and Las Vegas and Nevada law enforcement agencies that they needed to cull, and the constraints of the U.S. attorney’s “low-tech” database.

The 1.5 terabytes of information shared with defense was “by far the largest review and disclosure operation” in the history of the Nevada’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, Myhre wrote.

Prosecutors argued that the six Brady violations found by the judge encompass “one small portion of the discovery” and that the defendants can proceed with a new trial and “all the information they’re entitled to.”

Again, it doesn’t matter if it’s a big step across the line of the law or a small one, Mhyre and his team violated the law and the rights of the defendants. That remains undisputed, even in his legal brief. He’s actually admitting they broke the law.

“The government takes its discovery obligations seriously,” Myhre wrote. “The government seeks justice on the merits of a case, not through dodging discovery rules and technicalities, or by obscuring violations if and when they may occur.”

No, the government takes seriously its attempts at railroading good American citizens who are the backbone of America and whose families have ranched that land for 150 years, long before the BLM existed.

This is evident in the following things that Steven Myhre presented to the court to quell the defense’s ability to defend themselves and used anything and everything they could get their hands on to make the defendants look as bad as possible. Heres’ a few examples:

There’s more, but those are good examples of what the prosecution has been doing in these trials.

The defense called out the prosecution for failing to take responsibility for their criminal actions and point out the damage it caused to the defendants.

“The government’s irresponsible and, at times, false proffers to this court as well as its dismissiveness toward the defense inspires no confidence in the prospect of fairness,” wrote Brenda Weksler, an assistant federal public defender representing Payne. “Anything short of a dismissal is tantamount of condoning the government’s behavior in this case. … Dismissal is the only way to ensure such conduct will not happen again.”

Indeed!

Myhre seems to think he can take as many cracks at the defendants as he wants at a cost of millions of dollars to taxpayers via incarceration of the defendants and the salaries and costs of his prosecution.

Oregon Live added:

Prosecutors also believed the court’s restrictions barring self-defense arguments during earlier standoff trials this year meant they didn’t have to share information about certain aspects of the law enforcement response.

The prosecutors said, for instance, they didn’t become aware until Nov. 10 of a Tactical Operations Center log that referred to a surveillance camera outside the Bundy home – it was found on a thumb drive left in a federal vehicle — and still don’t consider it relevant to the Bundys’ defense. It contained four notations from observations on April 5 and April 6, 2014, largely noting the type of vehicles arriving and that a Bundy was seen outside on the phone.

“The government argued in good faith that the information was not material, and this court concluded that it was. That may make the government wrong, but being wrong does not equate to bad faith, nor does it show a flagrant disregard of the government’s discovery obligations,” Myhre wrote.

As for documents referencing snipers or maps of officers’ positions, some of the information was contained in earlier reports that had been shared on time, showing the prosecution’s actions weren’t done for “tactical advantage,” Myhre wrote.

A footnote from the prosecutors’ legal brief, regarding what they say they shared in the first two trials about the existence of federal snipers. The judge, in her ruling, was concerned that the government had denied the snipers’ presence near the Bundy Ranch in the first two trials, and at the start of the third trial.

While the prosecution seemed to make its own decision about what it would and would not turn over to the defense and claimed it was irrelevant, the defense was having none of that.

The defense said the prosecution’s behavior “was instrinsically wrong and has defeated the ends of justice.”

“Defense lawyers pointed out that the judge already found that the FBI knew of the evidence that was withheld and that there were federal prosecutors present during interviews of officers whose reports were not disclosed,” reported Maxine Bernstein.

“The government’s untimely disclosures came almost four years after the government began its investigation, and almost two years after the government secured its indictment. Based on the indictment, the defendants lost almost two years of their lives in custody,” Weksler wrote.

Weksler also wrote that the failure by the prosecution to provide the evidence, “affects cases beyond the one in question and is emblematic of a much larger problem.”

She then concluded. “The government cannot be fairly given another bite at the apple as a result of its own flagrant misconduct.

I agree. Myhre has had too many do-overs, which I believe are clear violations of Double Jeopardy.

Myhre and his team need to be arrested for their crimes and tried accordingly. He and those who practice litigation should be disbarred and never serve the public again.

Those who have made plea deals or faced convictions should, at the least have those revoked and given a new trial or have their sentences reevaluated in light of the fact they knew they were facing a government prosecution that wasn’t playing by the rules.

All the men involved should be compensated for their time in prison and a sincere apology given by the court for violating their rights and the law.